See? SEE? Aren't you glad now that you stuck with the show beyond the teething troubles of ep 1? And we're just hitting our stride with Ep 2. Which, admittedly, was a nightmare to edit - but we got there (in part thanks to some assistance at the 11th hour from the brilliant Chris Bullock). It was such a scramble to get this done that I hadn't even seen the full, finished, episode in one go before I had to upload it.

To be honest, after the technical issues with ep 1 (which I'll re-render, mix and re-upload at some point), I didn't care what anybody thought of the content of this week's ep; I just wanted it to look and sound okay. That bothered me with ep 1, because it's something that you can't attribute to personal taste. 

This week I've had quite a few people telling me not to take YouTube comments to heart, but I do need to stress that I really don't. They just wash over me, and this isn't just a "He doth protest too much" thing.

I don't get even slightly affected by the negativity (unless it's aimed at somebody I care about); either the person making shitty comments doesn't like what I've done (which is fair enough), or they're acting out (which sort of signifies something a bit sadder and deeper). Either way... whatever. I don't lose sleep over it. 

And, of course, the overwhelming majority of comments have been positive anyway.

I'm proud of what we've made here, I know it's good, it's true to what I wanted to make, and I'm also acutely aware that it won't be for everyone. Somebody said to me last week that we're living in a world of niches, and Digitiser is a niche. It always has been, for 25 years now. 

If you see me talking about shitty comments, it's just what Digitiser has always done. We often printed letters on Teletext saying how much people hated us, so this is comfortable territory for me.

Also, lest we forget, I wrote Pudsey The Dog The Movie. If even that hate-storm didn't get to me... this is nothing! So please... I appreciate the concern, but you really, really, really don't have to tell me to not read the comments. I know I'm old/fat/scruffy, I know my sense of humour is weird, I know some people will think Digitiser is shit. They can't tell me anything I'm not already aware of!

I wouldn't be doing this if I thought I couldn't handle it. And my wife wouldn't let me either. 

​And with that... on with my breakdown of this week's ep...

Guest Article by Super Bad Advice
​
​Right, let’s get the contentious issue out of the way first: I’ve always been a console gamer at heart. My first ever games machine was an Atari 2600 – the one with a bit of wood stuck on, no less, which I’m sure my 7-year-old self reallyappreciated (you know, young kids and their love of teak veneer and all that). 
 
And – aside from a brief diversion for the ZX Spectrum and an Amiga (sorry, Biffo) – I’ve stuck with consoles ever since. In fact, I last properly dipped my beak into all things PC about 20 years ago, when I managed to get Tomb Raider 2 running on a horrible beige Pentium 75 tower I had at university.
 
So obviously, I’m the ideal person to do an article about PC gaming!
 
Why the console preference? Well I’m dead lazy, so I like the lack of platform faff with no driver updates, setting tweaks and security updates for one thing. I’m also a big right-on hippy and like the fact that on console, everyone gets the same experience (and yes, that’s slightlyless true these days what with the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro – but only a teeny bit).

People love being first. Just ask anyone in a YouTube comments section, or Buzz Aldrin. Talking of, do you think Buzz Aldrin has loads of YouTube accounts, and he's the one sitting around at home in his t-shirt and braces, writing "First!" on all the videos? And then do you think he gets really angry if somebody beats him to it?

Probably, yeah. He probably starts snorting and huffing and stamping his feet while twanging his braces.

Anyway.

Everything has to start somewhere, but beating everyone to the punch doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be the best, or most successful (at that unspecified thing you're first at doing).

Here are ten examples of video game firsts which were overshadowed by those that followed in their wake.

I found some photos online the other day of where I live, dating back to the 1800s; instead of shops and roads and cars, grafted onto the shoulder of London, it showed a small village out in the sticks, a bunch of rundown cottages, dirt tracks and horse-drawn carts. 

It's fair to suggest that I'm obsessed with the history of my home town. At the moment, there's a ton of building work going on - a couple of the icons of my childhood are being torn down to make way for high-rise flats, and it's changing faster than at any other point in my life. Getting to witness change like that is the benefit - or downside - of living in the same place more or less your whole life. 

Indeed, my house is built on land which used to belong to a local miser called Daniel Dancer, whose only real friend was one Lady Tempest, the widow of a Yorkshire baronet. His reputation for hoarding - hiding his money in piles of pig shit, strapping hay to his body in lieu of having to purchase clothes etc. - was such that he became the basis for Dickens' Ebeneezer Scrooge. 

I've read quite a lot about Daniel Dancer, and though his miserly ways were no doubt the result of something which would today be classified as a mental illness, I love the notion that where I live was once wild and rural and unpoliced, and populated by characters who could've stepped out of a novel.

It's part of why I love so much of America, because so much of it is still, even today, completely isolated from the rest of the world. So much of it doesn't even feel real. There are huge swathes that are just... empty. You can drive for hours and not see another car, just mile upon mile of the most stunning open country.

It's also no coincidence that it's in many of those areas where the NRA and Trump have been able to get a foothold, and why there's such a suspicion of a liberal Washington elite wanting to take away their freedoms. 

And the thing is, playing Red Dead Redemption 2 is helping me to understand it.

Well, that was episode 1 out of the way, and I feel utterly emotionally drained. I'm not used to being in the spotlight like this, having so many strangers talking about me or my work. It's really weird and uncomfortable, and makes me want to hide in a tree. But I'm sure I'll get used to it. 

Nonetheless... loads of you seemed to love the first ep, and I'm very pleased it has gone down so well. The feedback makes the exhaustion worth it. It has been one heck of a journey getting it to this point, and so many people have been kind and helpful along the way. Not least the backers, and everyone who has shared it.

Here then, is a sort of commentary from me on last night's debut episode. Beware: SPOILERS.

While certainly not the worst thing with the initials GG that the games industry has ever seen, Sega's Game Gear was this: massively overshadowed by the Game Boy. Nintendo's handheld had the benefit of a head start, a load momentum, and "Tetty" (Tetris). 

Sega, however, was pretty confident that it could win the handheld war, by releasing a full colour machine. Now get a load of this controversial opinion: in many respects, the Game Gear was the better hardware. At least you could play it in low light situations, and it never gave anybody the clap (legal disclaimer: neither did the Game Boy, probably).

Admittedly, it wasn't quite as pocket-friendly as the Game Boy, and it chewed through batteries like a dog with an advent calendar, but it was essentially a hold-in-your-hand version of Sega's Master System, and that's a pretty remarkable thing. Heck, with the TV tuner add-on you could even watch Going For Gold and Fort Boyard on it.

Unfortunately, where the Game Gear stumbled was its game library - lots of Master System ports, basically - which simply wasn't as diverse or strong as the Game Boy's. And yet... there were some surprising gems in there which bucked the trend.

​Here are 10 Game Gear games which might just make you think again.

The gulf between really great retro game cover art and really bad retro game cover art never ceases to stagger me. I get that it was a different time, and that any arse who got a ZX Spectrum for Christmas could program and release a game, but man... it was pretty clear that possessing basic programming skills rarely went hand-in-hand with even rudimental graphic design ability. 

Because it's always fun, here's a quick trawl through some more of the Spectrum's most graphic atrocities.

Four years late, I've finally read Blake Harris's book Console Wars. Why so long? Well, I mostly read books on my Kindle, and I'd foolishly bought a physical copy of Console Wars which doesn't even light up or anything, and thus it sat unread on a shelf, emitting the occasional whine of lament.

The book covers the Sega VS Nintendo battle of the early-90s, and ends at the point Sony enter the market with the PlayStation. It's a period in the games industry that is of obvious interest to me, because that was when I was first douching my duffel as a games journalist.

As I've written elsewhere, I never wanted to become a games journalist - or, indeed, any sort of journalist. My thing had always been drawing pictures - that's how I thought my career would continue - and I ended up with Mr Biffo and Digitiser quite by accident.

Obviously, it was The Best Job, and I went from being somebody who played games for fun, to somebody who played them for a money, like a "brass" - and found myself having to cultivate relationships with the people who made them.

Digitiser always had a volatile love/hate thing with Sega. We were hard on them in a way we never were on Nintendo, and in return they seemed to deal with us with a sense of heavy resignation and/or unhinged rage. 

One of their PR guys hated us and wouldn't give us the time of day - most memorably,  on one occasion we arrived for a pre-arranged meeting, only to have him storm into the reception of Sega Europe HQ - red-faced and fuming as if we'd turned up unexpectedly and done a poo on his cat - to tell us that we'd dragged him away from a meeting with the guys from Mean Machines, just so that he could tell us that the Mean Machines guys were more important and we were plankton and that we shouldn't have pooed on his cat.

"We didn't poo on your cat though..."

"I HATE YOU!!!!"

His replacement was a lovely bloke, who despaired when we refused to pull our punches, or when we drew penises in the notebook on his desk, and he did his best to get us on side. We slightly loved him... the company he worked for not so much.

Nintendo, on the other hand, we had very little to do with. We'd always receive review copies on time. We'd get invited to their press events. But in terms of anything more personal... their PR team was always remote and unknowable. Indeed, I found it interesting how my own experience of Sega and Nintendo are reflected in Console Wars.

This isn't a review. Well, it sort of is, a bit. But also... not really. Actually, maybe. I DON'T KNOW.

​Red Dead Redemption 2 is enormous. Like, two discs enormous in an age when games no longer come on multiple discs. I'm barely over 25% of the way through the main story - not even accounting for the side missions and activities I could spend time with - and seen but a fraction of the world... but I'm itching to talk about it.

So... let's talk. 

I loved Red Dead Redemption. I might've loved it more than Grand Theft Auto V in fact. I loved the Wild West setting, the writing, the characters, the depth. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a literal return to that world - or, rather, a first visit, as it's a direct prequel featuring many of the same characters and locations - but with more of everything. Wads more.

It's also very much a Rockstar game. It shares its DNA with the GTA series - the controls are familiar, the writing and humour offers the same giddy swerves from maturity to broad satire... and the visuals make it feel like part of the same lineage. And - with some serious caveats - I like that it's part of that family. 

As with everything Rockstar does, it's a deliciously epic game, and though I might have grown tired of open world adventures featuring forests and mountains, and the character models might not be the best, there's something alluringly grounded about RDR2's look. What it lacks in flash it more than makes up for in grittiness and scope.

Why am I talking about RDR2's graphics first? Because I want to get it out of the way before I launch into an impassioned tirade about everything that drives me mental about this game.

Somebody pass me a bib; it's time to start foaming at the mouth!

Sony has announced the games line-up for its upcoming PlayStation Classic mini console thing (out in December for ninety quid-ish). And you know what? It's slightly better than I expected... and also - get this, ya big cormorant - slightly worse!!!!

While I was surprised to see the inclusion of Final Fantasy VII... I was then equally confused by the lack of Tomb Raider, not least because the franchises are both now stuffed into the baggy, wet, burrow of Square Enix. 

Just as with the Super NES and NES mini, this dwindled throwback is struggling to please everyone. For my money, these tiny retro systems should be seen as the equivalent of those museums-in-a-book (you know: with replica relics, and "flaps" to lift up and that).

I mean let's face it, if you really want to play an old PS1 game, there are plenty of dubious and not-so-dubious ways of doing so. Instead, there's just something nice about having all of a system's most iconic games within one shrivelled recreation. But what's the point if you're not going to include the classics on your Classic?

While managing to feature at least some heavy-hitters, the PlayStation Classic does seem to miss out on a ton of the PlayStation's most iconic, system-defining, titles. I mean, it doesn't even have that famous t-rex demo. You know the one: where you could manipulate a 3D Marc Bolan, and make him fall off a stage. That's a cool reference there for your mums and dads, kids.

Here's the full list of what will be included on the European version:

Battle Arena Toshinden
Cool Boarders 2
Destruction Derby
Final Fantasy VII
Grand Theft Auto
Intelligent Qube
Jumping Flash
Metal Gear Solid
Mr Driller
Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee
Rayman
Resident Evil Director’s Cut
Revelations: Persona
Ridge Racer Type 4
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo
Syphon Filter
Tekken 3
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6
Twisted Metal
Wild Arms

Below, I offer my suggestions for which of these games should've been replaced with something else...

Long story short, but I made the decision to drive to Blackpool for the Autumn Play Expo. It was unavoidable really; we had to be in Dartford on Sunday, for some reason, and the only way to be there on time was either to get the train back Saturday night, or drive home early on Sunday morning. 

I opted for the latter, so I could hang out a bit in the evening with some of the people who'd travelled up there for the Digitiser live panel I was hosting on Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately, that drive - as it was for everyone who took their car - was an epic. Over eight hours in total, with a route that dragged us over the Peak District in an effort to avoid the M6 crawl.

I didn't make it to the London Play Expo in August - being represented at that event's Digitiser panel by a pre-recorded video, and an army of guests from the series - but I attended the Manchester one a few years back, and the Blackpool show back in February. For me, it has a much nicer, more personal, feel to the Manchester show (and, from what I've heard, the London show). Even if the venue - the labyrinthine Norbreck Castle hotel - takes "faded glamour" and contorts it into "The Shining 2".

In February I announced the launch of the Kickstarter for Digitiser The Show. This time I was revealing some of the show itself - alongside two of my co-hosts, Paul Gannon and Octav1us, as well as two of the series' guests, Kim Justice and DJ Slope (alas, regular Digitiser hosts Gameplay Jenny and Larry Bundy Jr couldn't make it). 

The forum for this unveiling; a shambolic, thrown-together-at-the-last-minute, live episode!